When I asked Talbot if she had any advice to share for Billfold readers considering a career in academia, she laughed for a very long time and then asked me to quote her as “laughing for a very long time.”

I grew up in an academic household, and academia was a goal of mine from an early age. Both my parents are musicians teaching in academia, and while I also loved to perform, I had decided in college that I would probably follow in my parents’ footsteps and pursue teaching on a university level.

I usually teach three courses per semester, three credits each. $633 per credit, which comes out to $5700 for a four month term. I am not the primary money person in our family, thank goodness. But the money I earn takes care of all the non-essentials of life: piano lessons, trips, new tires.

I spent the summer working full-time for my old college with the bright promise of my new job around the corner. I calculated what I still needed to purchase, the expenses I would have before my first check in September, and I realized I had $500 to spend on new school clothes for the kids.

For the last seven years, I’ve been an adjunct professor of writing at three different institutions, while raising three kids mostly on my own. At the University of Oregon, that meant an annual, full-time salary of $27,000, though they offered me great benefits. At other schools, my salary ranged from $2,000/class to $4,000/class, though my cap was typically four or five classes a year, and never any work in the summer. This meant many summers (which would sometimes stretch to fall) on food stamps supplemented with a few trips to the food bank. It meant shopping at Goodwill, borrowing money from my mom or brother, floating checks, free lunch applications, payday loans. It also meant that I relied on friends for non-monetary help, too: picking up my kids from theater or chess, or getting groceries after I had back surgery, or just letting me vent and worry aloud about how hard it was to make ends meet.

Linda Lee is a part-time faculty member who slipped on ice and fell at a university where she was teaching. She recently wrote an informative post at The Adjunct Project on worker’s compensation from the perspective as an injured adjunct.